Social justice efforts in Vermont have persistently called for bans on hate speech.  But that desire creates new hazards, exhibited in recommendations by Vermont's Racial Equity Task Force. 

A typical argument for government oversight of the content of speech deemed hateful is advanced by a Vermont school principal:

[H]ate speech — which is an offspring of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow — is still legal and deemed constitutional. Allowing hate speech in our day is just as wrong as allowing slavery and segregation was in the past. ... Hate speech is violence, just as much as a gun or knife is. If it leads to either the immediate or long-term loss of a person's civil rights, it should be illegal. ... Laws and policies that permit hate speech against Blacks and other people of color are structural racism.

Hate speech is not confined to race; it is as old as humanity and well precedes American slavery.  The writer invokes "the loss of a person's civil rights" (presumably rights not to hear objectionable words) as the rationale to deprive people of their civil rights to say things that might be objectionable.  He labels existing Supreme Court precedent "structural racism," while calling to implement structural racism in the name of past slavery that would silence white but not black mouths.

Vermont's "Racial Equity Task Force" would deprive people charged with hate crimes from knowing the identity of their accuser — a fundamental right in law:

The Task Force ... recommends adding confidentiality provisions for complainants in civil hate crimes investigations conducted by the attorney general's office. Currently, no such confidentiality provisions exist. This creates a chilling effect for prospective complainants who fear publicity and retaliation[.]

The very phrase "civil hate crimes" conflates civil and criminal law.  Criminal defendants possess a fundamental right to challenge evidence against them.  The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution provides that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him."

Similarly, the Task Force advises to revise the intent requirement for Vermont's hate crime laws:

[T]he Task Force recommends thorough review and possible revision of the "malicious motivation" legal standard for hate crimes in Vermont. ... [T]he legal standard to prove malicious motivation is unduly burdensome. As a result, many cases featuring egregious behavior are not pursued or do not result in a finding that a violation occurred. This further creates a chilling effect for prospective complainants who already face significant barriers in coming forward. This also gives license to bad actors to engage in bad behaviors because they're not held legally accountable.

"Bad actors" such as Nazis and KKK members have the liberty to be "bad actors" without being held criminally liable unless there is an imminent or "true" threat.  The government is not free to punish "egregious" and "bad" behavior. 

As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in Virginia v. Black:

Intimidation in the constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death. ... It may be true that a cross burning, even at a political rally, arouses a sense of anger or hatred among the vast majority of citizens who see a burning cross. But this sense of anger or hatred is not sufficient to ban all cross burnings. As Gerald Gunther has stated, "The lesson I have drawn from my childhood in Nazi Germany and my happier adult life in this country is the need to walk the sometimes difficult path of denouncing the bigot's hateful ideas with all my power, yet at the same time challenging any community's attempt to suppress hateful ideas by force of law."

Vermont's Task Force insufficiently restrains its own "sense of anger or hatred" — it recommends eliminating core legal protections to expose innocent people to retribution for speech that should not be criminalized.  Per the prevailing social justice ideology, individual racism includes "implicit" (unconscious) bias:

These biases ... are activated involuntarily and without an individual's awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.

Vermont's Racial Equity Task Force proposes to criminalize speech for unconscious bias, projected onto "bad actors" by unnamed accusers without proof of intimidating or evil intent.  This is a prescription for unconstitutional government abuse of the First Amendment: 21st-century witch trials. 

Image: Tim Pierce.